Heterarchy for Seven Billion People

In this Evonomics article, Peter Turchin says that the reason we REQUIRE hierarchical governments is that we simply can't track the social profiles of seven billion people. Our brains don't have the processing power.   

The problem is that even our remarkable brains (still more powerful than any existing computer) are overwhelmed by the complexity of keeping track of social interactions in groups larger than 100–200 individuals (this is the famous Dunbar number). You can go up in social scale to a few thousand people, and still have such egalitarian face-to-face sociality working, but not much beyond that. Certainly, once you get societies above a million people, a hierarchical organization is inevitable. 

That's probably true of our biological brains, but what about our technological brains? I'm not talking about some post-Singularity transhuman cyborg thing. I'm talking about a dedicated worldwide reputation and influence tracking network. In terms of long-term survival of human civilization, this may be the single most important use to which the Internet can be put.  Trust is not optional in a world of WMDs.

This will not be an easy thing to build. All of the ancient problems of cooperation have to be solved all over again. How to enter the data in an easy and timely way. How to weight the data, or how to decide who is telling the truth, who is honestly mistaken, and who is deliberately lying. How to crunch all those data into some heuristic rule simple enough for an unmodified human brain to make real-time decisions about who to trust in any given situation.    

SteemIt in its current form is certainly not that network. It's too easy to get lost. The weighting of influence seems to be more on the number of followers one has (especially followers who themselves have a lot of followers) than the quality of one's posts. That's not just me bitching, because we don't really know how to judge quality beyond popularity, and we certainly don't know how to automate it.  Even the reading level scores for this post (there's a SteemIt bot that does this) vary between 3rd grade and 11th grade.   So proxy variables are required, as I described in this IGMS column from September 2015.   

Even scientists, studying concrete facts about the world, have to go through a never-ending process of building consensus about which facts are true and how to combine those facts into larger structures of knowledge that actually mean something, that give us some guidance about how best to move through the world.   

And the world is never deliberately trying to deceive us about its intentions!    

So building an accurate social influence model is going to be much more difficult than modeling the weather. But let's keep in mind that a hundred years ago, the accuracy of weather forecasts was not very good, either. Robots were just an idea. We've made a lot of progress.   

PlotBot is still just an idea, a SteemPunk meme-plex currently lodged in the brain of Randall Hayes, Ph.D. Read the monthly column at The Intergalactic Medicine Show.